Permission Media

Permission Media
Quentin Langley - International Editor
1/29/07

Technology changes behaviour, lifestyles, relationships and society. Technology changes the nature of Burke’s ‘little platoons’ which are the real basis of society. Society is not the state. At the heart of this technology is the technology of communication and cooperation.

The Roman roads united half a continent – then the stirrup destroyed the Roman Empire and roads fell into disuse. The printing press devolved education from the elite to the masses. The triangular sail opened the world to trans-oceanic trade and the steamship tipped that balance further. The railways made a reality of ‘manifest destiny’. Radio brought voices – and TV faces – into voters’ living rooms.

But all these technologies are, at the deepest level, broadcast technologies. They take the objects or information from one person or organisation and transmit them to many places. Only the telephone is interactive, and that only on a one to one basis. What our latest technological leap has done is to turn media consumers from passive recipients to active participants.

We are entering the age of permission media. The media no longer arrive fully formed and demanding to be heard. Those parts of the media that we receive are those that we invite in.

In journalism schools – such as the one in which I work – people are either excited or fearful. Sometimes, alternately, they are both.

Why should we listen to citizen journalists, people ask. We would not turn to citizen plumbers or citizen accountants. But the reason we would not do so is that we are convinced trained plumbers and accountants bring skills and standards of behaviour that we cannot expect to find in those untrained. If we believed what media schools teach about journalistic ethics – about fact checking, truth seeking, lack of bias, and the separation of news and comment – then trained journalists would indeed have something to offer that we could not expect to find in amateurs.

But we do not believe that the mainstream media (MSM) is offering these things. That is why we are increasingly turning to wider, participative, media.

This is not to say that media brands will die. The value of media brands is likely to increase, not decrease. Among the plethora of web-based media it can be hard to tell the difference, from a quick glance, between a professionally produced website and something knocked together by a 12-year-old in his bedroom. So people will return again and again to trusted brands. Some of these trusted brands will arise from the MSM – the old offline brands stretched onto the web. It is likely that people will continue to turn to the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times for their business and financial news. But new brands will arise too. Brands where news is sifted and opinions debated by a myriad of editors. From this mass of material we will each sift again – each becoming our own editor.

News and opinion will be open to challenge and debate. Received wisdoms and old consensuses will break down. One way media will give way to the logic of markets and the wisdom of crowds.

Media are changing. Hop on board and enjoy the ride.